Thursday, December 06, 2007

More catch up please

Since you all asked so nicely, oh hell, who am I kidding, nobody asked, but I'll tell you anyways. Here's yet another post dedicated to sitting back in the old easy chair regailing you with tails of my past two years. Let's see, thus far I've covered family and cars so that leaves business and biking. Can I get a woohoo? No? How about a, oh hell, let's just start.

I posted a hint back when I first started this blog about going into an adult industry business. We threw around a bunch of different ideas and even went so far as to look at a few rental spaces. As we guessed, most shut us down before we got past the words "adult oriented". Considering our friends in LA had trouble finding a space, we weren't too convinced that we'd ever find anything here. So, scratch that idea and let's look at something else.

We now were considering doing home parties. Hmm, sex toy parties for couples? What's not to love. Well, other than the fact that we pitched it to various friends and most thought it was an ok idea, we'd be jumping right into competing with some various other established home parties that were catering to similar crowds. Albeit, these other companies target strictly women, we weren't so sure about following this line of thinking.

Now we were starting to get a bit daunted by this task. We were just so enamored with the way our friends set up this awesome business and seemed to enjoy all the freedoms and interests we could see ourselves enjoying as well, we knew we had to find our niche. As luck would have it, we were soon to find that niche. During a visit to our friends in LA, they invited us to attend a lingerie trade show in Vegas with them. From there, an idea was hatched. Why couldn't we do for lingerie what they were doing for sex toys: find quality pieces, give them a personal review and stamp of approval, price them reasonably, and most of all have fun with the process.

We were sure we'd have people beating their way to our webstore in no time flat. Heh, those are the dreams that launch and fail countless businesses. We did some homework, put together a loose plan of attack, and jumped in head first. We went to Vegas on our own, bought a number of pieces for review, met manufacturers, and picked out some product. That's the easy part. We didn't figure that learning how to build a webstore would be the equivalent of setting up a colony on the moon. With neither of us having any real experience with website building, e-commerce, or anything much more advanced than using email or posting pictures on an internet forum, it's been a struggle.

We enlisted the help of some friends and I dug in to do our research on e-commerce. After what seemed like an eternity, we pieced together what we felt was a good start to a website and a fair e-commerce store. We modeled it loosely after our friends site with the store being secondary to the main page of reviews. I'm still not sure if this was a good idea or not, but it's up and running. We did a soft launch in January of 2007 in hopes of hitting the Valentines Day rush. Alas, our dreams of orders flowing through the door as soon as we hit the "open store" button were quickly dimmed. We're still plugging away though and working to make our store a success. We think the idea is the right way to go and eventually we're hoping to build a loyal base of customers along with a rock solid reputation built on quality, fast shipment, and excellent customer service.

Our future plans do include hosting some parties locally and a revamp of the store to make it fit better with our overall theme for the rest of the site. We even have a few ideas up our sleeves for some private label products. So, if you're still reading this and want to peruse the site, store, or even purchase something check out The Possibilities Room. I'll even throw in a bonus here. Use the word "blog" in the coupon code area when you check out and it will save you 15%.